An empty church

Friedrich Holderlin

A woman enters a room.  The room may be small or large, flooded with light or lit by a single candle.  There may be no furniture, no windows in this room; the floor may be bare boards or a tapestry of rich carpets.  She walks slowly.  Or perhaps she is running.

There are people gathered in one corner of the room.  They are silent.  They are watching the woman.  She turns to them.  She need not acknowledge them.  She already knows they are present.

She speaks to them.  What does she tell them?  She can tell them anything.

They listen.

2_______________

An empty theatre is like an abandoned church.  Here human joy or grief were once given voice.  Faith was an act of human will.  Ceremonies were practised, sacraments administered, acts re-enacted.  Belief was made flesh.  Belief was willed into existence.

Unlike a church, an empty theatre has no residing deity.  An abandoned church can retain its power for those who have faith.  It can remain a sacred space.  Here the deity can still be invoked by those who have faith.  Within the roofless walls of a ruined church a ceremony can still be celebrated.  God is still present.

In an empty theatre nothing can be invoked by faith alone.  It is an empty space.  There is no God.

3_______________

If our theatres do not respond to what we experience as individuals, to what perplexes or unites us as a community, leave the theatres empty.

By community I mean to include those who cannot afford the price of a theatre ticket.  I mean those beggars sleeping on the pavement whom we have to step over to reach our cars.  I mean that even metaphorically.  Horror of horrors!

4_______________

What follows an action is another action.  As a word follows a word.  As one breath follows another.

Are we breathing?

5_______________

Theatre is an act brought about by the collective will of a community, enacted by those skilled in its arts.

It is a collaborative journey from the moment in which we live into a present moment we imagine.  It is a parallel reality.  It is a metaphor.

6_______________

Theatre is difficult work.  It matters.  It isn’t about me.  It isn’t about you.  It’s about us.  Us is a very difficult idea at present.

7_______________

If theatre does nothing but comfort and confirm those who witness it, then theatre is unnecessary.  We have commercial television to comfort and confirm us, to deny history, to deny memory, to cheapen pain, to teach us the text of our denials.  We have the tabloid press to support our ignorance, to absolve us, to increase our distance from ‘The World’, to reduce tragedy to pathos, to teach us the text of our denials.  They both know just how much truth we can tolerate.  They have their sales figures to prove it.  They calculate their figures in hell (do you remember hell?  It’s where the terminally ignorant and the completely self satisfied recognize each other; they get on like a world on fire).

Theatre companies are beginning to do the same.

They are selling us ourselves.  The way we would like to be.  Our world only what we can touch; our living room ceilings are our heavens.

8_______________

Theatre has the same responsibilities as any other language.

9_______________

What does it mean to pray?  What does it mean to act?  In theatre these two questions amount to the same question.  A question asked by those who make theatre and by those who witness it.  Or should be.

Both to pray and to act mean to call upon our imaginations to rise to a moment of recognition and necessity.  To recognise is to know again.  To know what again?  And what is it that we need?

We need to know that we are not alone.  We are too much alone.

10_______________

What is silence?

Have the actors forgotten their lines?

Have we forgotten ours?

11_______________

Since the 19th century theatre has been viewed as an organ of dissent in the body politic.  This dissent has centred around the theme of the individual’s place in society.

Any commitment to this kind of dramatic radicalism requires a consistently dissenting stance.

The theatre artist must confront not only the overtly political questions of his/her time but also the world of feeling (this is the genuine radical stance).

Dissent can never be an industry.

Unless both the dissent and the industry are corruptions.

12_______________

Theatre is a public act.  It differs from the publication of a poem or a story, or the hanging of a painting.  It occurs in time.  A brief time.  A time not open ended.  A time not to be revisited.

Theatre occurs and then it is over.  It is not an artifact.  The act of theatre does not linger.  It cannot be recorded.  It resides only in the memory of those who witness it.

Theatre is mortal.

13_______________

All rituals are transgressions.  They enable the passage of a soul from one place to another.  From ignorance towards knowledge, out of darkness into light, from youth to adulthood, virgin to bride/groom.

Transgressions agreed upon.  Transgressions to be celebrated.

To enact, to repeat, to remember, to portray, are acts common to all cultures, to all times.  Why is that so?

Why do we need to see again what we already know?

14_______________

No act of theatre is natural.  It always leaves something out.  It always includes something unnatural.  Whether we like it or not our presence at an act of theatre is a collaboration with illusion, a subversion of reality, a transgression of materialism, a gamble on the existence of the spiritual.

15_______________

Theatre is primitive.  To forget that is to betray theatre’s essential energy and its single most powerful claim to any kind of dignity.

Ritual: a rite of passage, a transformation, an awakening, a reminder, a rekindling, an act of worship.  A bearing of the weight of being.  A celebration of the neverending.

Theatre is a ritual.  People gather.  They witness their representatives (the actors, the priests, the dancers, the warriors) enact the mysteries of common knowledge.

The gathered who witness, and their representatives who enact mysteries and passage, crime and redemption, the delights and the agonies of the soul, are equal.  Without one there is no other.  They are bound.

16_______________

Under the cloak of action the beast of thought.

17_______________

The audience witnesses what actually occurs.  Nothing else.  There is nothing but the will of the actor in play moment to moment.  The moment an act occurs stands as it occurs.  In the presence of its witnesses.  Within the capacities of the actor who is present at the moment of action. Who creates before our eyes that moment’s reality.  Or does not.  Failure is immanent.  Always.  Success is temporal.  The next moment has already erased the previous.

Nothing is at play but will and time.  The audience witnesses this play of forces.  In the feet and the hands, the torso bent or upright, in the eye’s sheer weight, in the breath an instrument of thought.  This struggle to remain present.

Because theatre is nothing else but this presence.  The actor wills this presence.  The audience have willed him/her to do so.

We have paid our money or our dues.

We do this in good faith or bad.

We accept or do not accept this moment of risk we have invited.

This moment of risk when we are both accountable, the maker and the witness of the making, is called theatre.

To fail to accept it is to consign yet another moment of living to join the many we have wasted.

What does accept mean?

It does not mean consume.

18_______________

Theatre:

In times gone by an unpleasant fact tolerated by the privileged and the dispossessed alike (sometimes you just have to piss in the garden).

At present (much more involved of course) a mystery rotting in the aspic of understanding (sometimes you just have to let the baby cry) or an item for sale in the shop of despair (I used to be an animal but I’m all right now) or a welcome relief (I’m just like him/her!, he’s/she’s just like me; does that mean I’m worthy of mention?) or I’m so glad that is not me (it could have been, it wasn’t, what are we doing tomorrow night?).

No, it never was you.  And it was always a bother.

19_______________

Theatre is mortal.  Theatre can be either an affirmation or a denial of that state.  Here.  Now.  We will face ourselves.

Or we will be betrayed by calmatives.

Life is not calm.  Only the very few think it is; these are the privileged.  Together with those who aspire to be among the privileged.  The dogs beneath the table, salivating; the child you ignore; the servant you tolerate; the student you prompt; the Molieres without the wit; the Shakespeares without poetry.

Theatre is people gathered in the face of their mortality.

20_______________

Language, memory, consciousness: theatre’s trinity, continuously giving birth to one another, continually astonished by one another.

21_______________

Theatre:

The product of a benign misunderstanding.  Between people.  About people.  As though we had something in common.

You, me and them.

Whoever they are.

They are not us of course.

And we are never ourselves.

We crave The Other.

The Other is the shadow of ourselves that someone else was frightened of.

We, on the other hand, are never afraid.

A shadow falls across the stage.

22_______________

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King.

23_______________

Generosity of spirit drives both the maker of theatre and its witness.  Generosity of spirit is a currently unfashionable idea simply because it is intimately connected to the idea of anonymity.  If you get my drift.  And I’m being ungenerous here.  Tut tut.

If generosity of spirit is not the root cause of the meeting between maker of theatre and its witness, then the theatre we are talking about concerns itself only with economics, with industry, product, cultural artifact, tourist attraction, or theatre as the envoi of political influence or as the lackey of the Minister of Foreign Trade.

Do you follow?

24_______________

The choice as to what an act of theatre may be is a collective responsibility.  In theatre no one acts alone.  Ever.

25_______________

Theatre ain’t here to please no one.

Suddenly the lights go out.

26_______________

Class: a theatrical concept.

27_______________

One thought is enough, and space enough to stand, enough light to see, a moment, however brief, to which we dedicate our presence, one turning towards, one single glance, is sufficient to see what we make of ourselves.

And then turn out the light.

28_______________

An actor walks onto a stage.  She is already a metaphor.  She is either well or badly drawn.

There is nothing else to decide.